HRTS 201: Introduction to Human Rights Theory

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Cornell University Press). Supplementary texts — Costas Douzinas The End of Human Rights; Micheline Ishay The History of Human Rights; Samuel Moyn The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History; Lynn Hunt Inventing Human Rights: A History; Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism; bell hooks Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Online resources — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on human rights, natural law, and utilitarianism; OHCHR open documents; Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy open materials; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR); African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; Arab Charter on Human Rights.

1. What Are Human Rights? The Idea and Its Paradoxes

Human rights are, in their simplest formulation, the rights one has simply by virtue of being human. They are not earned, not granted by any government, and (at least in principle) not forfeitable by misconduct. The definition is deceptively tidy. Each of its terms — rights, human, universal, inalienable — has been the subject of enormous philosophical dispute.

Jack Donnelly, in Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, proposes a working definition: human rights are equal and inalienable entitlements held by all individuals against the state. They are entitlements, not merely aspirations. To have a right is to be in a position to demand something and to regard its denial as a wrong that calls for remedy. This distinguishes rights talk from talk about benevolence. If a starving person has a right to food, the question is not whether anyone is kind enough to feed them but whether the duty-bearer has fulfilled an obligation.

Why should such entitlements exist? The most familiar answer is the natural-law tradition: there is a moral order discoverable by reason and independent of any legal system. A second answer is constructivist: rights exist because human beings have built institutions that recognize them, grounded in a historically contingent consensus about the minimum conditions of a decent life. A third answer is performative: rights are claims made in the name of the excluded, inseparable from the struggles that produce them.

Costas Douzinas, in The End of Human Rights, calls attention to paradoxes running through the liberal rights tradition. Rights are presented as universal, yet they are historically the product of a particular European moment and have often traveled in the baggage of empire. They are presented as inalienable, yet they have been suspended in emergencies, denied to colonial subjects, and withheld from those whose humanity was in dispute. The paradoxes are not accidents but structural features. The rights of man are announced as the rights of abstract humanity, but they are enjoyed only by those whom a concrete political community has recognized as belonging to it.

This tension — between humanity as abstract category and citizenship as concrete status — is the red thread of this course. Hannah Arendt will name it most sharply when she observes that those who had lost their political community had also lost their human rights, and that precisely those who most needed the protection of abstract humanity found it empty. The concept of human rights promises something no other moral category dares to promise: a floor of treatment owed to every person regardless of where they are from or who is willing to speak for them. What follows is an inventory of the efforts to vindicate that promise and the critiques brought against it.

2. Natural Law Foundations: Aquinas to Locke

The modern idea of human rights grows out of the older tradition of natural law, which holds that there are moral norms binding on human beings independently of statute or convention and that these norms can be known by reason. Classical versions run from the Stoics through the Roman jurists (who distinguished ius civile, ius gentium, and ius naturale) to Thomas Aquinas. In Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, natural law is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law of God: basic goods — life, knowledge, society — are intelligible to reason, and basic precepts follow from them.

Crucially, the classical natural-law tradition is not yet a theory of rights in the modern sense. It is a theory of duties and objective goods. The shift to a rights-centered language — the individual as bearer of claims others must respect — develops in the late medieval and early modern period. Historians such as Brian Tierney trace its beginnings to the canon lawyers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and to the late Scholastics of Salamanca, notably Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas, who applied natural-law arguments to the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas.

The decisive reworking comes in the seventeenth century. Hugo Grotius argued natural law would retain its force even if, on an impious hypothesis, God did not exist. Thomas Hobbes began with a state of nature in which each individual has a right to everything and no secure protection, deriving sovereign authority from the rational need to escape that condition. Hobbes’s individualism cleared the ground for rights-based political philosophy, but his conclusions were authoritarian.

John Locke, in the Second Treatise of Government, gives the natural-rights tradition its decisive modern shape. Locke’s state of nature is already governed by a law of nature, which reason teaches: no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions, because all are the workmanship of the same maker. From this Locke derives natural rights to life, liberty, and property, held prior to any political compact. Government is legitimate only insofar as it protects them; when it fails, the people retain a right to resist and replace it.

Several features of Locke’s theory matter for what follows. First, the rights are negative — rights to non-interference — not positive claims on others’ resources. Second, the individual is the basic unit; communities are voluntary associations of rights-bearers. Third, property plays an outsized role: Locke’s labor theory becomes the template for defending private ownership. Fourth, Locke’s universal language coexists uneasily with his actual exclusions — women, indigenous peoples whose land is treated as waste, and, in his work for the Carolina proprietors, enslaved persons. These tensions are not peripheral; they are the contradictions the rest of the course will study.

3. The Age of Revolutions: French and American Declarations

At the end of the eighteenth century, the language of natural rights leaps from philosophy into the founding documents of new states. The American Declaration of 1776 asserts that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 is more systematic: men are born and remain free and equal in rights, the aim of every political association is to preserve these natural and imprescriptible rights, and liberty consists in the freedom to do anything that does not harm another. It sets out rights to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, affirms freedom of religion, speech, and press, and establishes the principle of legality in criminal matters.

Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, argues that the sudden coalescence of rights talk cannot be explained by abstract arguments alone. It was also the product of new habits of imagination — the epistolary novel training readers to inhabit strangers’ inner lives, the growing revulsion against public torture, the spread of literate sociability. These shifts made it imaginable that peasant and prince shared the same interior and therefore the same moral status.

The declarations are triumphs and compromises at once. They announce universal rights and immediately circumscribe them. The French Declaration speaks of the rights of the man and the citizen, and the two differ: the man has natural rights, but only the citizen has political rights. Women are silently excluded from active citizenship. Olympe de Gouges, in her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman, rewrites the text in the feminine and notes that a woman who has the right to mount the scaffold must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. Slavery persists in the French colonies through decades of bitter struggle. Property qualifications limit the suffrage.

Micheline Ishay, in The History of Human Rights, describes the age of revolutions as the moment when rights vocabulary becomes a permanent feature of political argument. Every subsequent movement — abolitionist, feminist, labor, anticolonial — will turn the declarations’ own words against their framers. The declarations opened a disputed field in which the scope of the human came to be fought over.

It is worth distinguishing three ideas the declarations conflate: a right (an entitlement), a universal moral claim (an entitlement held by everyone), and a legally enforceable rule (an entitlement backed by institutional power). The natural-rights tradition claimed the first two but offered only limited support for the third. Enforcement depended on the very governments whose abuse the rights were meant to limit. The twentieth-century human rights regime is largely an attempt to solve this problem.

4. The Utilitarian Critique: Bentham’s “Anarchical Fallacies”

Jeremy Bentham composed an article-by-article demolition of the French Declaration titled Anarchical Fallacies. His verdict is famous: natural rights are simple nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights are nonsense upon stilts. His hostility is not rhetorical but follows from a distinctive view of what rights are.

In Bentham’s jurisprudence, a right is the correlate of an obligation imposed by law and enforceable by state sanction. Rights without laws are literally without content. The natural-rights theorist, by contrast, holds that there are moral rights preceding legal rights that legitimate legal rights must track. Bentham regards this as confusion. If one wishes to argue that a law is unjust, one should argue it in terms of its consequences for the happiness of those affected. Invoking a natural right substitutes a fabricated entity for real moral argument.

The moral theory behind the critique is utilitarianism: actions and institutions are evaluated by their tendency to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham insists that pleasures and pains are the sovereign masters under whose rule we sit. Rights, on this view, are at most useful summaries of welfare-promoting policies — rules of thumb, not moral fundamentals.

Bentham’s critique exposes two real weaknesses of eighteenth-century rights talk. The first is epistemic: how do we know these particular rights exist and not others? The natural-law tradition tended to gesture at reason, nature, or God in ways difficult to adjudicate. The second is institutional: without enforcement, what practical difference does a right make?

But Bentham’s position has its own weaknesses. Utilitarianism is willing, in principle, to sacrifice the interests of the few to the happiness of the many. The rights tradition is designed precisely to prevent such trades. To have a right is, among other things, to be protected from being treated as a mere means. Reading Bentham alongside Ronald Dworkin, who describes rights as trumps over ordinary policy calculations, sharpens the question of whether rights language is a confusion utilitarianism could replace or a moral achievement it cannot capture.

5. The Marxist Critique: Rights and the Jewish Question

Karl Marx’s 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question” is a different kind of critique. Marx does not deny that rights exist; he diagnoses what social relations they secure and what they obscure. Written in response to Bruno Bauer, the essay distinguishes political emancipation — formal legal equality, freedom of religion, freedom of the person — from human emancipation, which would transform the social conditions under which such formal freedoms coexist with material subjugation.

Marx’s analysis of the rights listed in the French and American declarations is famously sharp. The so-called rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, turn out on inspection to be the rights of the individual considered as a member of civil society: the egoistic individual separated from others, withdrawn into his private interests. Liberty is the right to do anything that does not harm others, based not on the union of humans but on their separation. Property is the right of selfishness. Security is the guarantee of this egoism by the state.

The point is not that these rights are worthless — Marx recognizes political emancipation as perhaps the greatest step the modern world had taken. The point is that they install a split. Citizens are represented in the state as an idealized community of equals; individuals in civil society remain atomized competitors defined by their position in a system of private property. A wage-laborer and a capitalist have the same vote and the same formal right to dispose of their property, but the content of those rights is utterly different.

This critique matters for several reasons. First, it introduces a distinction between formal and substantive rights that will reappear in every later debate about the gap between what rights promise and what they deliver. Second, it identifies the abstract rights-bearer as a historically specific figure reflecting a particular social order, not a universal human essence. Third, it foreshadows the twentieth-century struggle to supplement civil and political rights with economic and social rights — work, education, health, social security. Donnelly argues the UDHR and its two covenants can be read as a postwar attempt to reconcile these two families of rights in a single framework.

Marx himself was ambivalent about rights talk — in the Critique of the Gotha Program he treats appeals to equal rights as symptoms of a limited bourgeois horizon. But the critical power of his analysis — the insistence that rights be read together with the social relations they presuppose — continues to shape contemporary debates.

6. Who Counts as Human? Las Casas and the Debate at Valladolid

The next two chapters address a question the natural-rights tradition tended to assume answered: who is the human being whose rights are at stake? If human rights are held by all humans as such, then the boundary of the category matters absolutely.

One of the earliest and most revealing confrontations takes place in the mid-sixteenth century. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas spent decades documenting the cruelties inflicted on indigenous peoples by Spanish settlers. In the 1550–1551 debate at Valladolid, called by the Spanish crown to consider whether the conquest and its methods were just, Las Casas opposed Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who had argued from Aristotle’s Politics that the indigenous peoples were natural slaves — so diminished in reason that they required others’ governance — and that their Christianization justified conquest.

Las Casas’s In Defense of the Indians is a remarkable early rights document. He insists, first, that indigenous peoples are fully human beings, endowed with reason, capable of self-governance, organized into complex societies with their own laws and arts. He refuses the Aristotelian category of natural slavery. He argues, second, that conquistador methods — massacre, torture, forced labor, enslavement — violate the natural law binding on all peoples and rulers. He argues, third, that Christian faith may only be proposed by peaceful persuasion, never imposed by force. His conclusion is radical: the inhabitants of the Indies retain their sovereignty, property, and rights, and the Spanish presence is legitimate only insofar as it respects them.

Las Casas should be read with open eyes. He initially endorsed, and later repudiated, the importation of African slaves as a substitute for indigenous forced labor — a position he came bitterly to regret. His universalism is framed through conversion rather than modern self-determination. But his work is the first large-scale sustained argument in European thought that non-European peoples are rights-bearers whose violation by Europeans is a wrong, not a matter of sovereign discretion. Vitoria offered a parallel juridical argument, and together these Dominican thinkers opened a line of reflection linking the encounter with the Americas to later debates about empire and international law.

Valladolid matters for human rights theory because it exposes the mechanism by which exclusions from the rights of man are produced. The question is rarely whether humans as such have rights; it is whether this class of beings counts as fully human. The rhetoric of natural slavery, diminished reason, childhood of the race, biological inferiority, cultural backwardness — these are masks of the same operation. To take rights seriously is to be suspicious of the operation whenever it is performed.

7. Slavery, Abolition, and the Moral Arc of Rights

Nothing tests a theory of human rights more severely than chattel slavery. The European powers that announced the rights of man were the main operators of the transatlantic slave trade, moving millions of Africans across the ocean to provide forced labor for New World plantations. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by men many of whom owned enslaved people. The French Revolution was reluctant to abolish slavery in Saint-Domingue until the self-liberation led by Toussaint Louverture forced the issue.

Thomas Paine’s 1775 essay African Slavery in America, one of the earliest American denunciations, argues in straightforward natural-rights terms. If liberty is the birthright of every human being, the trade in human beings is an outrage against nature. Paine exposes the hypocrisy of colonists who clamor for their own liberties while holding others in bondage, and insists the enslaved are not criminals forfeiting their freedom but people acquired by kidnapping and violence. The argument’s force is rhetorical: it applies the tradition’s own logic to a case it had willingly overlooked.

Later abolitionist movements drew on a wider repertoire. Freed and fugitive enslaved people — Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth — spoke from experience, forcing audiences to confront the humanity they had been encouraged to deny. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, in the US in 1865, in Brazil in 1888. The abolitionist movement is often taken as the first successful transnational human rights campaign; its techniques of testimony, publicity, petition, and boycott became templates for later movements.

But ending the legal status of slavery did not end racial hierarchy. In the US, Reconstruction was followed by Jim Crow, lynching, convict leasing, and segregation. In European colonies, abolition was followed by forced labor, indentured migration, and racialized law that reproduced much of slavery’s substance. W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon would argue that any serious account of human rights must take seriously the afterlife of slavery and empire and how the modern category of the human was constructed through racial exclusion.

The lesson is that the arc of moral progress is neither automatic nor irreversible. Rights expand when particular groups claim the vocabulary of universality and back those claims with organized political power; they contract when that power is withdrawn. Universality is not something already present in the concept, waiting to be acknowledged. It is a task every generation either furthers or betrays.

8. Feminism and the Expansion of Rights

The exclusion of women from the rights of man was one of the most visible omissions of the revolutionary era and drove some of the most productive rethinking of rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) argues that the exclusion is philosophically incoherent. If rights rest on reason, and women possess reason, then women possess rights. The apparent inferiority of women is, she insists, not nature but the consequence of deficient education and infantilizing conditions. Give women the same cultivation of mind and the alleged grounds of their exclusion vanish.

Wollstonecraft’s method is as striking as her conclusions. She takes the premises of the rights tradition at face value and pushes them to their logical end. She does not ask for rights as a favor; she insists the tradition’s own logic already commits its defenders to granting them. This is the strategy feminist and anticolonial movements will use again and again: to turn the universalism of rights language against those who would bound it.

The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention produced the Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it opens with the words that all men and women are created equal and enumerates grievances in place of those charged against the British crown. The strategy is Wollstonecraft’s and Olympe de Gouges’s before her: hold the founders to their own words. Seneca Falls marks the effective beginning of the organized women’s rights movement in the US, and its suffrage demand opened a struggle that took seven decades.

By mid-twentieth century, much of the formal legal scaffolding of women’s exclusion had been dismantled, but the material and ideological conditions of subordination had not. Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique — opening with “The Problem That Has No Name” — diagnosed the unease of white middle-class American women promised fulfillment through domesticity who found it hollow. The book became a touchstone of second-wave feminism, focusing attention on reproductive freedom, workplace discrimination, domestic violence, and sexual autonomy — issues formal suffrage did not address.

bell hooks, in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, observes pointedly that Friedan’s “problem that has no name” was the problem of a small privileged slice of women, and that her book barely acknowledges poor women, Black women, and other women of color, whose experience of domesticity was framed by very different economic and racial realities. For many of those women, paid work was not a liberation but a grinding necessity long imposed; the idealized housewife’s life was a luxury from which they had been actively excluded. hooks argues that a feminism taking white middle-class experience as universal reproduces, inside the women’s movement, the same operation by which the rights of man had been made to mean the rights of propertied European men.

hooks’s intervention — Black feminist and intersectional thought — has had large consequences. It requires the rights tradition to take seriously that people are not humans in the abstract but simultaneously gendered, raced, classed, and positioned within webs of power. It has produced new human rights agendas — against domestic violence, for reproductive rights, for sexual minorities, for recognition of unpaid care work — that the male liberal tradition had not initially imagined.

9. Hannah Arendt and the “Right to Have Rights”

The bleakest philosophical intervention in twentieth-century human rights theory is the chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism titled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” Arendt writes as a stateless refugee from Nazi Germany about the catastrophic collapse of the protections the rights of man had been supposed to offer. The interwar displacements — millions made stateless through redrawn borders, fascist denaturalization decrees, the expulsion of Jews and other minorities — exposed a structural failure no cosmetic reform could repair.

The failure is this: the rights of man were supposed to attach to human beings as such, independently of any political community. But in the absence of a political community, a human being was simply a human being, and in that abstract condition had no rights anyone was obligated to respect. Once stateless, one did not merely lose one’s citizenship; one lost the very possibility of having rights. The paradox, Arendt writes, is that precisely when loss of political community rendered a person most in need of the protections of abstract humanity, the abstractness of that humanity became visible as emptiness.

From this diagnosis Arendt derives her famous formulation: what is fundamental, more fundamental than any enumerated right, is the right to have rights — the right to belong to a political community in which one’s other rights can become effective. Without it, one is reduced to what Giorgio Agamben later calls bare life: biological existence stripped of political standing.

Arendt’s critique is devastating but not meant to destroy the rights tradition. It forces the tradition to take seriously its institutional preconditions. A rights regime with no answer to the question of what to do with those who fall out of every regime is a regime announcing a promise it cannot keep. The postwar UN, the UDHR, the UNHCR, and the 1951 Refugee Convention can all be read as responses to the failure Arendt diagnosed. So can the later development of international human rights law, the responsibility to protect, and international criminal tribunals.

Whether these responses are adequate is another question. Samuel Moyn, in The Last Utopia, argues the mid-century moment was not as decisive as retrospective narratives suggest, and the contemporary human rights movement really emerges only in the 1970s, after the failure of earlier political utopias. But Arendt’s diagnosis hangs over whatever comes after. Any human rights theory that cannot address her question — what happens to those cast out of the state system — is incomplete.

10. After the UDHR: The Postwar Human Rights Regime

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted without a dissenting vote by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, is the central document of the postwar human rights regime. Drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, with decisive contributions from figures such as René Cassin, Charles Malik, P. C. Chang, Hansa Mehta, and John Humphrey, among many others, the Declaration contains thirty articles that together offer a comprehensive catalog of rights ranging from the classical civil and political — life, liberty, freedom of thought and expression, equality before the law, the prohibition of torture and slavery, due process — to the economic and social — work, rest and leisure, a standard of living adequate for health and well-being, education, participation in the cultural life of the community.

The Declaration was explicitly non-binding, a statement of common aspiration rather than a treaty. Its legal translation was expected to follow in the form of one or more covenants. In the event, Cold War divisions led to the splitting of the project into two treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), both adopted in 1966 and entering into force in 1976. Together with the UDHR, these documents are often referred to as the International Bill of Human Rights.

Jack Donnelly emphasizes that the division between the two covenants reflects political expediency more than philosophical necessity. The Western bloc pressed for a strict and immediately enforceable treaty on civil and political rights, while the Soviet bloc and many postcolonial states pressed for the equal dignity of economic and social rights. The compromise produced two separate instruments, with somewhat different enforcement architectures, but the substantive idea that rights are indivisible and interdependent — that civil and political rights cannot be effectively enjoyed by people who lack the material basis for a decent life, and that economic and social rights cannot be secured without civil and political liberties — has become a cornerstone of contemporary rights discourse, reaffirmed at the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights.

Around the UDHR and the covenants has grown up a considerable body of further instruments: the Genocide Convention (1948), the Refugee Convention (1951), the conventions against racial discrimination, against discrimination against women, against torture, on the rights of the child, on the rights of persons with disabilities, and others. There are treaty bodies, special rapporteurs, a Human Rights Council, a High Commissioner, regional human rights courts, international criminal tribunals. The OHCHR maintains the treaty and monitoring infrastructure. The practice of governments producing periodic reviews of their own human rights performance — and of independent actors contesting those reviews — is now routine.

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia offers a useful corrective to any triumphalist story about this regime. Moyn points out that through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the UDHR was largely sidelined in practice; the real energy of international politics flowed elsewhere, into decolonization, development, national liberation, and socialist transformation. It is only in the late 1970s, he argues, after the disappointments of those projects, that human rights moves to the center of moral politics — first through the helsinki and dissident movements in Eastern Europe, then through NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and finally through the foreign-policy discourse of Western states, especially during the Carter and Reagan administrations. The contemporary human rights movement is, on this reading, a relatively young phenomenon, and its character is shaped by the political moment of its birth.

Joseph Slaughter, in Human Rights, Inc., adds another layer. Slaughter argues that the humanitarian novel — the Bildungsroman, the literary form of the individual coming to self-realization within a civil society — has provided the imaginative template for the international human rights regime. The ideal rights-bearer imagined by the UDHR and its descendants is in some ways modeled on the protagonist of that literary form: a self-actualizing individual whose development requires the scaffolding of a liberal order. Slaughter’s analysis is sympathetic but critical. It points out that the human of human rights is not a neutral category but one shaped by particular literary and cultural habits, and that other imaginations of the self — more communal, more rooted in kinship, more ambivalent about individual autonomy — fit less comfortably into the frame.

11. The Universality Debate: Cultural Relativism vs Universalism

No sooner had the UDHR been proposed than it was challenged in the name of cultural difference. In 1947, as the Declaration was being drafted, the American Anthropological Association, then led by figures shaped by Melville Herskovits, submitted a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights warning against the imposition of a single set of standards on the many peoples of the world. The statement emphasized that values are embedded in cultural contexts and that a declaration of rights written from the assumptions of one tradition risked being experienced as another form of cultural imperialism. Its authors did not mean to defend the practices of fascist or colonial regimes; they meant to raise the question of whose voice was to count in defining the universal.

The universality debate has had many lives since. The strongest form of cultural relativism holds that moral norms are meaningful only within particular cultural frameworks and that there is no trans-cultural standpoint from which to evaluate them. A more moderate form argues that there are universal values but that their interpretation and priority vary across cultures and cannot be read off from any single tradition. The defenders of a robust universalism insist, with Donnelly and others, that certain rights — against torture, against slavery, against arbitrary execution — are defensible as universals both morally and in terms of the emerging cross-cultural consensus reflected in the ratification rates of major treaties.

A generation of anthropologists, including Mark Goodale and Harri Englund, have moved the debate beyond the stark relativism-versus-universalism opposition. They have studied how human rights ideas actually travel, how they are translated, localized, appropriated, and resisted on the ground. Their ethnographies suggest that neither the story of abstract universal norms descending from Geneva to a passive locality nor the story of closed cultures defending themselves against Western ideas captures what happens. Real practice involves what some call vernacularization: local actors taking rights vocabulary and bending it to their own purposes, sometimes against the grain of the metropolitan institutions that produced it. A women’s rights activist in Malawi, a land-rights defender in the Andes, and a disability advocate in Japan may each be doing something recognizably continuous with the international human rights movement and yet also distinctively shaped by their local context.

Elizabeth Zechenter’s essay “In the Name of Culture” argues that the relativist position is often invoked in bad faith by regimes or elites seeking to shield oppressive practices from criticism under the cover of culture. Those most loudly claiming the right to cultural self-determination are frequently not the members of the group whose rights are at stake but the authorities who benefit from limiting them. Women subjected to violence or exclusion in the name of tradition, children denied education, minorities persecuted in the name of majority identity — these people, Zechenter argues, have rarely been the ones invoking cultural relativism. The argument should not be whether cultures are to be respected (they are) but whose voices within a culture are entitled to speak for it and how to hear the voices of those who dissent.

The more sober versions of both sides of the debate converge on something like this: human rights are not the property of a particular civilization, but they are not free-floating either. They are a moral and political language that has become globally available, and they are most defensible when their specific content is worked out through an ongoing dialogue that takes seriously both the commitments of the universal framework and the particularities of the places and histories into which it enters.

12. “Asian Values” and Non-Western Critiques

One influential form of the relativist challenge is the so-called Asian values argument, prominent in debates of the 1990s. Leaders and commentators associated with Singapore, Malaysia, China, and other East and Southeast Asian states argued that the liberal human rights model was incompatible with East Asian cultural traditions. On this account, East Asian societies valued community over individual, harmony over conflict, duty over entitlement, stability over liberty, and collective economic development over individual civil and political rights. The Bangkok Declaration of 1993, issued by Asian states ahead of the Vienna World Conference, insisted that while human rights are universal, their interpretation must take account of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural, and religious backgrounds.

Xiarong Li, in “Asian Values and the Universality of Human Rights,” offers a careful critique of the strong version of the argument. Li points out, first, that the idea of a unified Asian culture is itself a fiction that flattens enormous religious, linguistic, and political diversity. The traditions of Confucian East Asia, South Asia with its dense pluralism of religious traditions, Buddhist Southeast Asia, and the Islamic societies of West and Central Asia cannot be reduced to a single set of values, and to claim otherwise is to perform the very cultural essentialism the argument purportedly opposes. Li notes, second, that the Asian values argument often serves the political interests of authoritarian regimes, providing a cover for the suppression of dissent, independent trade unions, free press, and political opposition. Third, Li argues that there is nothing in Confucian, Buddhist, or other Asian intellectual traditions that entails hostility to human rights. Confucian ethics, with its strong demands of rulers’ moral responsibility and its concern for the welfare of the people, can be read as compatible with, and even supportive of, a rights-respecting politics. The Asian values argument is, in Li’s hands, less a philosophical position than an ideological maneuver.

Still, the underlying critique that the canonical framing of rights carries a particular cultural signature is not empty. There is genuine work to be done in reading human rights alongside non-Western traditions — Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, Indigenous, African — and in asking what those traditions contribute to, and demand of, the vocabulary. The African philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has argued that African communitarian traditions are not alien to rights but provide them with a different kind of grounding and a different pattern of emphasis, foregrounding duties owed within communities as much as entitlements asserted against them. The Islamic scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im has argued that a rigorous and historically informed reading of the Islamic tradition can support a robust human rights framework, even if particular interpretive schools resist it. The broader point is that the universality of rights is not best defended by insisting that the Western version is already universal; it is better defended by participating in an overlapping consensus that many different traditions can reach by their own routes.

13. Regional Systems: African, Arab, Inter-American, European

Alongside the universal UN framework, several regions of the world have developed their own human rights systems, each with its own charter, institutions, and distinctive preoccupations. These regional systems are both implementations of the universal framework and laboratories in which its assumptions are tested and sometimes revised.

The European system is the oldest and most developed. The European Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1950, created the European Court of Human Rights, whose judgments are binding on the states that have accepted its jurisdiction. Individual applicants may bring cases against their own governments, and the resulting body of jurisprudence has reshaped domestic law across much of the continent on questions ranging from press freedom to the treatment of prisoners to the rights of migrants. The European social charter, adopted separately, covers economic and social rights with a different enforcement architecture.

The Inter-American system rests on the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969, and on the older American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have been especially active in confronting the legacies of dictatorship in Latin America, ruling on disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and amnesty laws that sought to insulate former officials from accountability.

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, adopted in 1981 and also known as the Banjul Charter, is philosophically the most distinctive of the regional instruments. Its preamble and text draw on African traditions of communal belonging alongside the language of individual rights, and it contains several features that set it apart from other charters. First, it gives explicit weight to the rights of peoples — to existence, to self-determination, to free disposal of wealth and natural resources, to economic, social, and cultural development, to peace and security, to a satisfactory environment — alongside the rights of individuals. Second, it is notable for pairing rights with duties, asserting that individuals have obligations toward their families, their societies, the state, other legally recognized communities, and the international community. Third, it combines civil and political with economic, social, and cultural rights within a single instrument, rejecting the split that shaped the UN covenants. The African Commission and, later, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights give the charter institutional form, though their authority is contested and their resources limited.

The Arab Charter on Human Rights, first adopted in 1994 and revised in 2004, is a more contested instrument. It affirms many of the rights familiar from the UDHR and the ICCPR but has been criticized for provisions that permit or leave ambiguous certain derogations — for example, in relation to gender equality, the treatment of non-citizens, and the application of the death penalty to juveniles — and for the relative weakness of the supervising Arab Human Rights Committee. Defenders of the charter point out that it reflects a negotiated compromise among states with sharply different legal systems and that any regional instrument is a starting point for ongoing argument rather than a finished product.

Regional systems matter for three reasons. First, they bring enforcement closer to the ground, allowing individuals and groups to seek remedy from bodies more accessible than distant UN mechanisms. Second, they allow particular regional concerns — the legacy of colonialism, the legacy of dictatorship, the concerns of pastoral or indigenous communities, the interaction of religion and law — to shape the interpretation of universal norms. Third, they provide a testbed for the ongoing negotiation between the aspiration of universality and the reality of plural traditions. They are where the student should look to see how human rights actually operate as a living legal practice, rather than as a purely normative abstraction.

14. Contemporary Critiques: Decolonial, Posthuman, Indigenous

The last several decades have produced a number of critiques of the human rights framework that refuse to choose neatly between for-and-against. Decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, and Sylvia Wynter have argued that the category of the human that underwrites modern rights talk was itself produced through colonial processes. On this reading, who counted as fully human — as the rational, autonomous, propertied subject imagined by the rights tradition — was determined in and against the racialized, colonized, enslaved other. To take human rights seriously, from this standpoint, is not merely to extend the category of the human to those previously excluded but to reopen the question of what the category is and whose experience it is built to fit.

Indigenous rights activism and scholarship push in a related but distinct direction. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognizes rights to self-determination, land, culture, language, and free, prior, and informed consent in relation to projects that affect indigenous territories. These rights are held by peoples as well as by individuals, and their recognition has required the universal framework to accommodate forms of belonging — to land, to ancestors, to more-than-human communities — that do not fit comfortably into a framework designed around individual autonomy. Indigenous legal scholars have argued that human rights, far from being a finished export from the metropolis, are being reshaped from below by peoples whose own legal traditions predate the modern state.

Posthumanist and environmental critiques go further still, asking whether the circle of moral concern properly extends beyond the human altogether — to other animals, to ecosystems, to rivers and mountains granted legal personhood in several jurisdictions. Whether one views these developments as overreaches of the rights vocabulary or as its logical extension, they pose a question that the classical tradition could defer: what does it mean that the human in human rights has been imagined as a creature distinct from and elevated above the rest of nature, and how must the framework change if it turns out that our flourishing is not separable from the flourishing of the ecological and more-than-human worlds in which we live?

There are also critiques from within liberalism that target the practical record of the human rights movement. Critics such as Stephen Hopgood have argued that contemporary human rights institutions are increasingly detached from the political struggles in which rights originally grew and that they risk becoming a bureaucratic monoculture. Others have criticized the selective and politically convenient application of rights language by powerful states, which denounce violations by their adversaries and overlook their own or those of their allies. Samuel Moyn, already mentioned, asks whether human rights — as they came to be framed in the late twentieth century — have been a sufficient or adequate response to global inequality. A world in which every individual is free from torture but drowns in the inequalities produced by a global economic order is not, on Moyn’s telling, the world that mid-century visionaries imagined.

Reading these contemporary critiques together, one arrives at a picture that is neither the breathless celebration of human rights as the moral Esperanto of mankind nor the dismissal of them as ideological theater. Human rights are a project — a long, unfinished, contested project — of constructing a shared vocabulary for the minimum of decent treatment owed to every person, and of building institutions that can make that vocabulary effective. The project has expanded the circle of those recognized as bearers of rights in ways that earlier generations would have found unimaginable; it has also fallen short of its own promises in ways that later generations will find unforgivable. The task of a course in human rights theory is not to resolve this situation but to equip the student to think carefully within it — to take seriously both the philosophical claims and the historical record, to appreciate the critique and the continued necessity of the vocabulary, and to notice, whenever someone announces what rights mean, whose voice is speaking and whose is still waiting to be heard.

The central insight that emerges across these chapters, from Locke’s state of nature to the latest decolonial critique, is that the definition of the human that underlies any rights regime is never simply found; it is always being made, remade, contested, and defended. The history of rights is the history of that contest. Joshua should leave this course not with a single doctrine about what human rights are but with a more practiced ear for the question, an awareness of the traditions that have shaped the available answers, and a sense of the work that remains — philosophical, political, and institutional — if the promise of the rights tradition is to be made real for those to whom it is still only a promise.